ReFrederator Blog

Why, look! It’s that lovable and unfairly forgotten cartoon character, The Powerful Katrinka! Die hard comic strip buffs remember her from Fontaine Fox’s wonderful Toonerville Folks, a newspaper feature that lasted almost fifty years (and disappeared over fifty years ago.) But she also starred in a handful of animated adventures way back in the thirties — films that put her thick accent and superhuman strength to good, comic use.

The closest The Powerful K has come to an actual comeback in recent years was last summer when a handful of commentators made inappropriate references to her while talking about Hurricane Katrina (remember she was KATRINKA — two k’s.) Too bad. She’s a great pen and ink personality, and one of that relatively small clique of cartoon characters who had to drag around both an extra article and adjective to clue audiences in to who they were (THE Powerful Katrinka, THE Little [Read more…]

Was always kind of fascinated with the way old-time Hollywood studios treated their cartoon shorts like little movies. To think that they actually made and distributed posters for each little gem… well, the mind boggles (granted, my own mind is particularly boggle-prone about all things animated.)

Now, I can only recall actually seeing such a poster in an authentic theatre lobby, performing its original function — advertising the regular exhibition of single animated short subjects — exactly once. It was in a rundown movie palace a couple of months before its closing and eventual demolition. The poster was a very old one for Terrytoons (not the one illustrated above) and, come to think of it, the movie I was seeing with my family was not accompanied by any ‘toon, Terry or otherwise. Some irony.

Dave Kirwan

Ya just gotta love old time cartoon music.

First of all… there was so much of it! During Hollywood’s heyday, an animated short was the one type of theatrical film that always featured a continuous musical score from first frame to last sprocket hole. Then there’s the fact that while most of the characters are viciously trying to hit each other, eat each other, or blow each other up with firecrackers, the background music remains sprightly, energetic, and so damn cheerful!

Carl Stalling, the guy behind those wonderful Warner Brothers soundtracks, has received a lot of deserved attention the last decade or so. But there was a whole gang of great cartoon composers like Scott Bradley, Sammy Timberg, Phil Scheib, and Clarence Wheeler. Each had his own style and approach, each was capable making a major contribution to a great film, and each was equally capable of making a dull short seem [Read more…]

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I think I was a gullible kind of kid, tragically unsuspicious. I pretty much accepted the wisdom and truth of anything my elders told me, no questions. Santa Claus? Of course! Tooth Fairy? Sounds logical! Electoral College? Makes sense to me!

But even I thought there was something intrinsically fishy about the nontraditional families of cartoon characters. Where did all these “nephews” come from? And why do they always bear a clone like resemblance to their “uncles”? Where are the supposed birth parents of these mischievous offspring? I mean, we know all these star characters have girlfriends, sometimes several, but what about their invisible siblings? Later in life I discovered that at least Disney went to the trouble of identifying  the mother of Huey, Dewy and Looie in one, lonely cartoon (Donald gets a note from his sister, Dumbella.) But at a dangerously tender age, I picked up on the fact [Read more…]

Oh boy! A beat up old cardboard box housing an equally beat up old Castle Film starting that beloved elder statesmen of animated hijinx, Farmer Al Falfa! This guy’s cartoon career goes back so far that when they actually made a theatrical short called “Farmer Al Falfa’s 20th Anniversary”, we were only halfway through the Great Depression!

I love stuff like this. In a pre-internet era, a pre-cable television era, a pre-any-kind-of-televion era, the cartoon delivery system was Dad’s trusty, rusty old Bell and Howell projector. Can’t you hear the kids now, begging for a break in the home movies long enough to slip in a Terrytoon? Of course, I’m not sure if anyone ever enjoyed the elderly farmer’s antics quite as much as he seems to enjoying them himself in this illustration. Even in the world of retired cartoon characters, Farmer Al Falfa’s fanbase is about as numerous as [Read more…]

Most of us buy into a whole culture of common cartoon knowledge; stuff that has no basis in reality, but we all accept at face value because, I suppose, we’ve seen it thousands of times right there on the screen. You know, well known facts like billy goats eat tin cans or elephants are always afraid of mice. How about that thing where if a cartoon character eats another character, he assumes the vocal inflections and physical likeness of whoever it is he just ate? Okay, that last one’s more than a little disturbing, but, still, it’s one of those agreed upon animated rules of thumb.

I was thinking of such things the other night, while watching an oldie, “Betty Boop and Little Jimmy” with an audience of about 70. Here’s the cartoon that posits the novel notion people who laugh a lot get fat, so when the title characters launch [Read more…]

Guilty pleasure… spot gag cartoons! I suppose a lot of fans groan when these things pop up instead of a film with an established leading character, but I always got a kick out of the really, really contrived one shot cartoons. Somebody would pick a suitably generic topic (sports, zoo animals, the Mississippi River, whatever), dream up a dozen really thin jokes, and bingo! Instant cartoon! Warners did a lot of these in the late thirties, early forties and Lord knows Paramount-Famous spit ‘em out like watermelon seeds well into the mid fifties. And, okay, much of the entertainment value in these things is unintentional. The writing gets almost hilariously lazy a lot of the time, and everybody else in the studio strains so hard to pick up the slack. Case in point: the scene above is one of the big laughs from “Sports Champions” (WB, 1941). It’s almost as [Read more…]

Like most buffs, I developed my addiction to old time animation by
watching great, glorious gobs of the stuff on T.V. One thing that
distinguished the really vintage theatrical type cartoon characters
vs. the made for television guys — they changed! As a kid, I was
probably unaware that these older films were made over the span of
decades by dozens of different creative teams. But I sure as hell
picked up on what I saw. Porky PIg is going to elementary school in
one cartoon, and then in the next one he’s all middle aged, filling
out his income taxes!  And his weight! Up, down, up, down! Sometimes he looked positively tiny, and in other films you figure they just used a saucer to trace his outline!

Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Betty Boop and the others all changed age, shape and proportion time and time again. Hell, Mighty Mouse seemed to have trouble staying the same size in [Read more…]